Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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The weird thing about this line of thinking is that if you take it to its logical conclusions, you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore, because all we do is exist on this earth.

One of my early projects at Google involved latency optimization - incredibly boring, invisible stuff. At the end of the project, we'd saved maybe 20ms/search, and my boss was like "20ms/search * 3 billion searches/day = 60M seconds/day = 16K hours/day. Every day, you've saved humanity 16,000 hours of their lives."

And then I 20%'d on the PacMan doodle, which had an estimated 400 million hours of total playing time. Well, shit. There goes the next 68 years of latency optimizations.

(As an aside, this feels a lot like what Silicon Valley does. Save time on your job so you can waste it on social media, crypto gambling, or computer games. You just can't win, because there is no win condition - we'll continue to exist regardless of what we choose to do in the meantime.)

Chuckled a bit at this. The other way to interpret it is everything matters

The doodle is a net win, because it makes people happy (and they can skip it if it doesn’t). The latency makes everybody sad. You increased net happiness in the world.

I'd like to echo this point. People having more time to do what they want is a net benefit itself. How they choose to use that time is up to them.

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life. “ — Socrates

Did it make them happy, or make them think it made them happy? (only said half teasingly, with thoughts of what the game industry actually optimizes)

That's funny, but it also sounds like a cynical way of looking at your work. Once you throw in games in the "waste of time" bucket, where do you stop? Movies? Music? Drawing? etc?

20ms sounds like very little, but have you ever tried to get anything done in a place where everybody has a lax attitude towards time?

You kinda said it - lowering latency is less about saving time, it's more about saving annoyance / making the product more pleasant to use.

I might be particularly sensitive to it - I have a strong preference for low latency and tight controls in everything including cars. Ten or fifteen seconds bootup, don't care too much. I click on a browser tab and it takes 200ms to switch - ugh, is there a better browser?

That's 20ms on a good link, but on a bad one there's probably a multiplier.

Too bad all these savings are eclipsed by js cruft.

> you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore, because all we do is exist on this earth.

And, in some ways, it really doesn't matter, by itself. 16,000 hours. 68 years. Those are potentials, not realities. You give or waste time. But what is that time used for? Do people make any meaningful usage of it? What is meaningful?

Some will say everything is. Some nothing is. But trying to find a middle path and to keep at least some semblance of objectivity, are we making meaningful usage of our time? As a civilization, as a species, is humanity headed in any particular direction? Is it a good direction? Are we progressing?

And, more practically, if we don't have good answers to those questions, does giving people more time to waste, really matter?

>There goes the next 68 years of latency optimizations.

If you use a derivation like your boss did as the KPI, sure. But the way he did it seems like the wrong way to go about it. Would make more sense to me to think about it in terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_degrees_of_influence#Mor..., and gradients of computational latency. Quite literally the function call latency of the global information supply chain^Wsocial graph.

Remember: A vehicle full of people is a rolling wetware data center.

> I 20%'d on the PacMan doodle

was that a purposeful choice?

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